Monday, May 4, 2009

Fun with butterflies!

As promised I have been spending a fair amount of time this spring looking for butterflies. I've found its a lot more productive if you concentrate on either birds or butterflies on a particular outing and not both. If you pay attention to birds you barely even see butterflies and vice versa, there is just a wider gap in search images, scanning techniques etc. than I would have imagined. Of course you can still listen for birds while butterflying :) Anyway I've had a lot of fun with it, particularly the whole "larval food plant" aspect of butterflies, and also the relative ease of photography (at least compared with birds). Its been a very rainy spring here in Stillwater, which has really put a damper on looking for butterflies in the last few weeks, but here are some images of butterflies that I have taken so far this spring. So far I have only seen 20 species or so, but I hope to expand that exponentially as the summer progresses here in Stillwater and also when I eventually head to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of TX, later this year.

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All photos Copyright Vince Cavalieri unless otherwise noted. Do not use any of these photos without contacting me. If you want to use any of my photos for educational or conservation reasons please contact me at vince.cavalieri@okstate.edu

About Me

I am a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Michigan. I am the recovery program leader for the federally endangered Great Lakes Piping Plover (and also for Pitcher's Thistle a threatened Great Lakes endemic dune plant). I completed a master's degree in wildlife ecology at Oklahoma State University studying the ecology of Cerulean Warbler and other forest songbirds in the Ouachita Mountains and Ozark Plateau. I've been obsessed with birds and birding since I was a very young child. I hail from the boreal forest transition of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, making me a yooper. I attended Michigan State University for my undergraduate degree in Fisheries and Wildlife before migrating to the prairies of Oklahoma.